The Favourite is an examination of the relationship between Sir Walter Ralegh and Queen Elizabeth I. Ralegh is not usually viewed as engaging the queen’s affections with the same intimacy as Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester and Robert Devereux, the second Earl of Essex. In the popular imagination, Ralegh’s defining moment as a courtier is to lay his cloak over a puddle for Queen Elizabeth to step on. Lyons sees this famous event -Continue reading>

In Spring 1575 at Kenilworth, the Earl of Leicester organised a series of pageants in order to entertain Queen Elizabeth I on her progress. The masque of the goddess Diana’s quest for the nymph Zabeta reveals that Zabeta, as Susan Doran and Helen Hackett observe, is a truncated anagram of ‘Elizabeth’ implying that the nymph is the queen’s persona. The masque was not performed at Kenilworth due ‘to lack of opportunity and seasonable weather’, but was published in George Gascoigne’s The Princely Pleasures at the Courte at Kenilworth(Gascoigne 53).

The masque arguably promoted Leicester as Elizabeth’s ideal husband:

And Jove in heaven would smile to see

Diana set on shelfe….

….where you now in princely port

have past one pleasant day,

A world of wealth at wil,

you henceforth shall enjoy;

In weded state…(Nichols 514-15 cited Hackett 89)

Hackett argues that ‘weded state’ was ‘a metaphor for political favour, just as love-language was deployed in [Christopher] Hatton’s letters [to Queen Elizabeth] of the same period’ (Hackett 89). Doran maintains that the masque presents Leicester’s proposal of marriage to Elizabeth. The above passage, however, is more Continue reading →

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Early Modern Exchanges
The official blog of Early Modern Exchanges that studies the diverse cultural, historical, economic and social exchanges between England and Europe, European countries, the Old World and the New in the period 1450-1800.